Paris updates for family and friends in Singapore, Turin, Beijing, and beyond!

Sunday, January 02, 2011

Thoughts on 2010

It's been such a long time that this blog has laid dormant. I still do not have the heart to delete this blog (which was an original intention). It has morphed from being a line to the rest of the world to being just a quiet place for me to make mental notes to myself and anyone else who wished to benefit from the experience. Facebook killed the blog as a form of updating friends and family, but I think there is still some place for blogging as a way to record and share some of the reflections which are otherwise consigned to one's mental storerooms.

I think the biggest change for me in 2010 was the career switch from one form of law to another. I now call myself a climate change lawyer, and it's exciting stuff, but it is one of the biggest challenges of my professional life. Humbling, but exhilarating at the same time. However I am a little more circumspect about the fanatic in me about global warming etc.. My friend J calls me a munchkin because I used to be so excited about building windfarms or cogeneration facilities, or some new form of fuel switch, and corrected me to say that it is the wind farm developer that built the farm, we just provided the paperwork and the bankers got rich on the deal. Oh well, that is right to an extent, but I still feel a little bit good about the fact that we all played a part in the process.

The toughest thing is being a hands on working wife and mother. The juggle is incredible, and is one of the reasons why this blog is silent for so long. I just was so tired I couldn't think or reflect. Which in retrospect is probably a contributing cause to the fatigue, because we all need a purpose, and when I became too tired to reflect on my own purpose, then the daily grind leads to exhaustion.

When Fabien and I collapse into bed each week together (yes, he travels so much for work now we see each other on weekends only) we are too tired to speak, but I realise that it is a false economy of time, because it eats into the marriage after a while and we risk becoming room-mates and co-parents without being a madly in love couple that started our life together. So we realised halfway that we needed to keep working on it, and set aside time to re-discover each other again, because we are such time paupers yet our life is so wonderfully diverse and rich, and we have so many things to tell each other and share if only we take a bit of time (that we don't always have) to tdo it.

Speaking of the richness of life, the baby Alexandra is no longer a baby but a little girl, and Sophie is four years old going on fourteen. Yep we have a teenager in the making here. They are both asserting their independence in so many different ways, from the clothes they wear to the refusal to hold hands while walking and deciding to wander off by themselves!